Maryland’s 1834 American beaver records trace the state’s waterways from end to end, from the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal National Historical Park along the Potomac, where 64 records make it the single busiest site, out through the Piedmont reservoirs and suburban creeks of Montgomery and Prince George’s counties to the tidal marsh channels of Blackwater and Eastern Neck national wildlife refuges.
A dam builder in the Chesapeake watershed
A beaver needs slow or still water and a steady supply of bark, twigs, and aquatic plants, and Maryland supplies that in nearly every county. Records run down the C&O Canal’s slack water, through the managed wetlands of the Mckee Beshers and Millington wildlife management areas, and into the coastal plain’s beaver ponds, where dams back small streams up into marshy wetland that frogs, ducks, and fish then move into.
Working straight through winter
Beavers do not hibernate, and Maryland’s record shows it. Counts climb through March and April, when two-year-olds leave the family lodge to found colonies of their own and fresh cutting advertises every active site, dip through the hot months, then rise again in December as beavers cut and stash branches underwater beside the lodge, a winter pantry they can reach from beneath the ice.
Status in Maryland
NatureServe ranks the American beaver S5, Secure, in Maryland, and the species is native to the state. USGS NAS does not list it as nonindigenous here.
Full species profile
